Gary Campanella

gbc@garycampanella.com * 818.813.3719

Professional History

The through line of my long career, a career that began by sweeping floors in shopping malls, has always been value. How do it create it? How do I add it?

My specialty has been aligning business operations with strategic objectives. I excel at bringing teams together and facing them forward. I have motivated multi-disciplinary teams, geographically distant teams, and teams with differing interests and styles to find common ground and common purpose. I help teams see the forest AND the trees.

I am a builder — and the things I build share a common thread: they bring people together around something worth experiencing.

As Head of Client Relations at Found Hospitality, I help organizations create food and beverage programs that function as genuine employee benefits — thoughtfully designed, operationally excellent, and deeply responsive to the people they serve. Found is currently contracted with the Irvine Company to build and operate a new restaurant and food service concept at a premier corporate business park. My work is fundamentally relational: I earn trust, understand client needs at a granular level, and help our team deliver beyond expectations.

As the founder and Publisher/Editor of The Muleskinner Journal, I lead an award-recognized literary publication that has grown rapidly and successfully to more than 15,000 unique annual page views, earned repeated citations as a top literary magazine, and built a community of writers — established and emerging — who share a commitment to work that is honest, courageous, and surprising. The Muleskinner is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, and I am actively pursuing grants, sponsorships, and partnerships to fuel its next chapter.

These two pursuits are not as different as they might appear. Both require listening closely, earning trust, and creating community and the sense of belonging needed for something excellent to emerge. I have spent my career doing exactly that — across 23 years in global operations leadership at Capital Group, in public service with LA County, and now in the ventures I have built myself.

I am also a writer, and I bring that sensibility and sense of story -- your story, my story, our story -- to everything I do.

See resume here

Artist Resume

See resume here

Backpacking Resume

See Resume here

Gary Campanella recently left the Capital Group Companies after twenty-three years, where he served as Vice President and Senior Manager of Office Services.  He has a Bachelor’s degree in English from Ripon College, and completed his graduate work in Composition at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.  He has attended multiple Bread Loaf Writers Conferences and Napa Valley Writers Conferences. He has studied creative writing at Stanford University and attended multiple workshops and programs through Harvard Business School. He served fourteen years as a volunteer Mediator in the Los Angeles Superior Court ADR Program, and as a Mediator with the Los Angeles County Department of Consumer Affairs. After leaving Capital Group, he spent two years as an Executive Fellow for Los Angeles County’s Anti-Racism, Diversity and Inclusion Initiative (ARDI), where his focus was on the Prevention and Promotions Services Program.

In 2021, he founded Muleskinner Journal.

In 2023, he formed Found Hospitality.